[Commlist] Past-Pandemic Imaginaries Conference

Our two-day international conference Post-Pandemic Imaginaries takes 
place in Liverpool on 5^th  and 6^th  September 2024. Organised by the 
Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the School of the Arts, 
University of Liverpool, UK.

**Y*ou can register and book accommodation at preferential rates at 
www.ccel.uk <http://www.ccel.uk>. PhD students fee is £20.*

This two-day interdisciplinary conference explores changes in the 
experience and imagining of everyday urban spaces following the COVID-19 
pandemic. It focuses on the processes of reimagining, remembering and 
remapping of everyday culture and experience through a post-pandemic 
lens. It considers the heterotopic glimpses of a post-pandemic world 
that may have happened under lockdown, galvanised by a collective 
experience of space and time that transformed everyday living and the 
alternative, virtual forms of social and spatial relationships that were 
brought into play. It looks at how the everyday urban imaginary was 
reconfigured, the combination of dystopian and utopian moments, the 
contrasts between chaotic and overcrowded confinement for some, and 
pause and rest offered to others. If there was a utopian impulse amid 
the terrors of the pandemic, what did it look like, and what traces 
remain? Did the projected imaginings of post-pandemic urban futures 
contribute to substantive changes that are discernible now? Was it all 
just a blip? What traces of pandemic behaviour and experience remain in 
our daily interactions? Has the pandemic brought about a keener 
awareness and value of the local? How did art and photography respond to 
the temporary transformation of public and social space? How have forms 
of everyday mobility changed? Are there stories that reveal a 
transformation in how people engage with and imagine everyday urban 
spaces? And if there are, what do these spatial stories look like? What 
do they say and how might they be traced or mapped? What does 
re-engaging the everyday mean in a post-pandemic world?

We have an exciting line-up of speakers and topics, please see the full 
programme below:

*Keynote speakers:*

*Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)* <https://www.stefcraps.com/>

Stef is Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he 
directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He has authored or 
edited numerous books, special journal issues and articles on trauma, 
memory, climate change and eco-emotions as mediated through culture.

*Professor Dawn Lyon (University of Kent)* 
<https://www.kent.ac.uk/social-policy-sociology-social-research/people/1942/lyon-dawn>

Dawn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. She has 
published widely on the sociology of work, time and everyday life. Her 
recent research includes analysis of accounts of everyday life collected 
by Mass Observation during the Covid-19 Pandemic, attending to rhythm 
and future imagining.

*Conference programme (may be subject to minor changes)*

*_DAY 1   5 ^September 2024_*

9.30       registration / coffee and croissants and Welcome

10         Keynote Lecture – Professor Dawn Lyon  (University of Kent, 
UK) Title TBC

*Panel 1    Connections with Place and Space*

Joanne Lee (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)  ‘The Local, the Ongoing 
and the Future: Journaling Sheffield in Virus Time’.

Laura Harris (University of Southampton, UK)  ‘Windows: Connection, 
Contagion, and Culture’.

Selena Kimball (Parsons School of Design, USA) ‘Atlas of Air’.

Peter Quinn Davis and Joel Hodges (University of Plymouth, UK), 
'“Somewhere” Not Quite Here or There "BETULA’.

LUNCH (provided)

*Panel 2     Care in the Post-Pandemic*

Viviana Valle Gomez (University of California, USA) ‘Whores at the End 
of the World: Rejection of Work and the Possibilities of Care’.

Pamila Gupta (University of the Free State, South Africa) ‘ “The Good 
Life”: Caring for Home, Dwelling in a Post-Pandemic World’.

Yeran Kim (Kwangwoon University, Seoul, South Korea) ‘Postpandemic 
Temporality: Affective Ethics of Care’.

*Panel 3    Reimaginings *

Nick Clarke (University of Southampton, UK) ‘Fragments from Mass 
Observation’s Pandemic Diaries’.

Howard Walmsley (independent filmmaker / artist, UK) ‘I Looked Into 
Their Eyes And I Saw Only Pixels’.

Hossein Derakhshan (London School of Economics, UK)  ‘The Peakless City’.

*Panel 4 **Memory and Nostalgia*

Olatz Rebeca Buesa Aguirre (University of the Basque Country), 
‘Nostalgia-core: Virtual escapism during the Covid-19 pandemic’.

Alex Henry, (University of Leeds, UK) ‘Crip Spacetimes in the 
Post-Lockdown Novel: “I Want Everything to Go Back to How It Was Before” ’.

Shanshan Wu (University of Liverpool, UK) ‘"Escaping the Virus Zone": 
Vlogging the Pandemic Memory among Chinese International Students in the 
UK’.

*18.00 *   drinks reception

*19.30*   conference meal (optional)

_*DAY 2   6 ^September 2024*_

9.30       coffee and croissants

10       Keynote Lecture – Professor Stef Craps  (Ghent University, 
Belgium) "Navigating Crisis Imaginaries: Intersections of COVID and 
Climate Change”.

*Panel 5    Seeing through the Pandemic*

Simon Fleury (Birmingham School of Art and Design, UK) ‘Museum//camera: 
Reimagining Museum Conservation in the Pandemic Pause’.

Alberto Iozzia (Boston University, Massachusetts, USA), ‘Look at Each 
Other: Redefining Proxemics and Space on a Virtual Theatre Stage’.

David Bate (University of Westminster, UK) ‘Machinic Unconscious’.

LUNCH (provided)

*Panel 6    Reconfigurations of Home*

(shorter papers all from University of Lisbon Centre of English Studies, 
Portugal)

Rasha Neddar (ULICES), ‘Chronicles of Home in a Pandemic: Capturing the 
Narratives in COVID-19 Diaries’.

Jean Page (ULICES), ‘Locked into the Local: Entrapment or New Ways of 
Knowing’.

Zuzanna Zarebskas (ULICES), ‘A meditation on life: Charlotte Wood’s 
/Stone Yard Devotional /and the human condition’.

Margarida Pereira Martins, (ULICES), ‘Writing through the pandemic’.

Paula Horta, (ULICES), ‘Imaginations of home in Portuguese urban art 
before, during and after COVID-19 pandemic’.

*Panel 7    Reinventing Community *

Emily Beswick, Ruth Cheung Judge and Sufea Mohamad Noor (University of 
Liverpool and Liverpool East and South East Asian Network, UK) ‘Thinking 
with East and South East Asian Organisers in Liverpool: Anti-racist 
Claims to the City and the Galvanisation of ESEA Activism in the 
Post-Pandemic Context’.

Laura Taggart (University of Liverpool, UK) ‘Hidden Culture: Power, 
Identity and Affect in Leicester Food Practices as a Template for 
Post-Pandemic Imaginaries’.

*Plenary  - conference end 5pm.*

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